Nevada was on the brink of irrelevancy--but a late veto today saved it!

My article ran today in The Hill, the same day the Democrat Governor of Nevada decided to veto the National Popular Vote legislation sent to him! Well done, Governor!

Here is an excerpt from my article in The Hill:

The election in Nevada in 2016, in fact, is a good microcosm of what will happen to Nevada and other small and rural states if he NPV compact succeeds. Clinton did not win Nevada by traveling the state and appealing to a wide swath of the population. She won Nevada by winning a massive majority in just one county (and a slight plurality in one other). Where Clinton won the whole state by just 27,000 votes, she won more than 82,000 votes more than Trump simply in the county containing Las Vegas, and thereby won the state.

If those supporting the National Popular Vote initiative succeed, they will make all small and rural states like Nevada irrelevant in our national presidential conversation. In making these voters irrelevant, they also will be radicalizing our politics by centering ever more power in major urban centers, which already contribute most of the money fueling our campaigns and the media reporting on them.

And all this is happening within state legislatures without a serious national conversation that an actual amendment to the Constitution would demand — one that which our republic deserves.

Democracy's Seed of Death?

Democracy's "Seed of Death"

I recently had the chance to take some of our Tocqueville programming on the road to share it with students at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, WV. For them, I chose to discuss the following quotation which comes from Volume I of Democracy in America (and which we will be discussing Monday night with Dr. Farrier, I assume).

"Every government carries within itself a natural vice that seems attached to the very principle of its life; the genius of the law-maker is to discern this well. . . every law whose effect is to develop this seed of death cannot miss becoming fatal in the long run, even if its bad effects do not immediately make themselves felt" (227-228).

Tocqueville helps us understand this by talking about an absolute monarchy and how its irrational tendency is to drive ever more power into the central office of the monarch until it eventually destroys itself.

What is this "seed of death" for democracy? Why, it is, of course, the tendency to drive more and more power into the hands of the people.  

Tocqueville praises our American founders for understanding this and putting in place institutions that could resist this destructive tendency. They gave us an unelected Supreme Court, an Electoral College (a real one, not what we have today), Senators chosen by state legislatures, federalism and equality of the states, a written Constitution with a specified amendment process that insisted on changes going through institutions in a specified manner.

The progressives told us the cure for the ills of democracy was more democracy. They got many of the reforms that they wanted.  Tocqueville tells us more democracy will destroy democracy.  Which is it?